Careless People (3 page)

GLAMOR OF RUMSEYS AND HITCHCOCKS

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

The Great Gatsby
,
Chapter 1

T
his is a book about possibility.

In the spring of 1922, Nick Carraway moved from the Middle West to Manhattan, having consulted with his family, who deliberated the decision as if they were choosing his prep school. At last they agreed, and he moved east to work for a brokerage firm with a name that might not worry the naive: Probity Trust. Nick found a cottage fifteen miles from New York City, amid the mushrooming mansions built by newfound wealth, surrounding himself for about eighty dollars a month with the consoling proximity of millionaires. He would study finance, learning the secrets of Midas and Morgan and Maecenas. In an era of booming stock market fortunes everyone was making money: why shouldn't he? America was embarking on a spree; the world was rich with promise and there was always more money to be made: “
Bonds were the thing now. Young men sold them who had nothing else to go into.” Nick was ready for a fresh start, enjoying “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” He
didn't yet know that fresh starts can become false starts: it all depends on the ending.

In the autumn of 1922 another young man moved from the Middle West to Manhattan, arriving four days before his twenty-sixth birthday. Unlike Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not his own fictional creation—at least, nowhere near to the same degree—and he really did move to New York City in late September 1922. He was not in finance; indeed, he was usually in financial difficulties. He, too, was young, optimistic, fairly pleased with himself, but his own artistic aspirations far exceeded his character's modest admission that he was “rather literary in college.” Unlike the alter ego he created to tell the story of his novel about greatness, Scott Fitzgerald wanted to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. His ambitions, he wrote later, “once so nearly achieved,” were to be “a part of English literature,” a part of our inheritance.

Although later readers would persistently confuse them, the similarities between Scott Fitzgerald and Nick Carraway are mostly superficial. Both came from middle-class Midwestern families and acquired Ivy League educations—although Fitzgerald sent Nick to Yale, a university for which, as a loyal Princeton man, he had some competitive contempt. Both Fitzgerald and Carraway tended toward judgmentalism, but also, correlatively, toward idolatry. Both were susceptible to glamor, and both were anxious about its capacity to corrupt. Both enjoyed material luxury but were also moralists who worried about its spiritual poverty.

And both moved to Long Island in 1922, where they would live through an extraordinary sequence of events. They were not exactly the same events, not identical, but their symmetry tilts toward the feeling of a design. For those who could sense the design as well as Fitzgerald, symmetry begins to shade toward prophecy. Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

S
cott Fitzgerald wired Max Perkins on Monday, September 18, that he and Zelda were coming to Manhattan after a year's sojourn in the bored, sprawling Middle West. They were keeping their return a secret: “
Arrive Wednesday tell no one.” He also requested that Perkins wire a thousand dollars to his account, to pay for their trip and for establishing themselves in New York. The next day Scott and Zelda left Scottie with her nanny in St. Paul and boarded the train for the two-day journey to New York.

The bard of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald heralded its arrival two years earlier with the publication of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
,
and his marriage to Zelda Sayre exactly a week later. The Jazz Age “bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War,” he wrote later. “A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” it was all part “of the general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921.” In early 1922 he had published his second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned
,
and they had spent an uproarious summer at the Minnesota resort of White Bear Lake, before they were asked to leave and take their uproar with them. Wearied of such provincialism, they decided to head back to the white chasms of Manhattan, taking a suite at the Plaza Hotel while they searched for a house near the city. On the train going back to New York they had a violent quarrel, Zelda said later, although by then she had forgotten why.

Of their long train journeys,
Zelda remembered pale green compartments that moved like luminous hyphens through the rolling dark night. The dining car glinted and shone just as modern life promised, and the compact limitations of train life captivated them both, until their cigarettes and whiskey were infiltrated by the metallic taste of their surroundings. In the morning, in preparation for arrival, a porter was available to steam and press traveling suits, and the
Twentieth Century
employed a professional barber, who could give a man a close shave with a straight razor while hurtling along at seventy miles an hour.

About to turn twenty-six, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a slender young man, with dark golden hair and glittering “
hard and emerald eyes.” With his “
sophomore face and troubadour heart,” he was “
such a sunny man,” friends remembered;
another recalled, “
Fitzgerald was pert and fresh and blond, and looked, as someone said, like a jonquil.” Pencil sketches and medallion-sized cameo photographs of his classic profile were regularly printed in the new gossip magazines and Sunday supplements. Just the week before, on September 10, the New York
World
ran a large feature naming Fitzgerald one of America's Dozen Handsomest Male Authors.

Fitzgerald was so tall and straight and attractive, remembered H. L. Mencken, “
that he might even have been called beautiful.” At five feet eight inches (his passport added another half inch), Scott Fitzgerald was not tall, but he was dapper, and exuberant with early success. “
Fitzgerald is romantic,” his friend Edmund Wilson had written earlier that year, “but also cynical about romance; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has an Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921

His good looks and charm had helped propel Fitzgerald to instant fame when
This Side of Paradise
sold out its first printing in twenty-four hours; the novel “
haunted [their] generation like a song, popular but perfect.” It was so popular that a newspaper reported the story of a schoolboy who was asked to name the author of
Paradise Lost
and replied unhesitatingly, “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Fitzgerald clipped the item and pasted it in his scrapbook.

Zelda Fitzgerald, 1922

His wife, chic, provocative Zelda, was considered a great beauty, a woman of “
astonishing prettiness,” although it is agreed that photographs never did her justice, failing to convey “
any real sense of what she looked like . . . A camera recorded the imperfections of her face, missing the coloring and vitality that transcended them so absolutely.” Zelda's honey-gold hair seemed to give her a burnished glow and her éclat was soon legendary.

Her greatest art may have been her carefully cultivated air of artlessness; Zelda understood the aesthetics of self-invention.
The flapper was an artist of existence, Zelda said, a woman who turned herself into her own work of art, a young and lovely object of admiration. Her behavior was calculated to shock. Meeting Zelda for the first time nine days after her marriage to Scott, his friend Alec McKaig wrote in his diary, “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then die in a garret at 32.”

Zelda's intelligence was unquestionably acute and she had a singular way with words, a gift for inventive and surprising turns of phrase, said Edmund Wilson. “She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of free association of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly; she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other.” Her conversation was “full of felicitous phrases and unexpected fancies, especially if you yourself had absorbed a few Fitzgerald highballs.”

On the cloudy, cool morning of Wednesday, September 20, 1922, as their train pulled from the gray-turning light into the cavernous gloom of Grand Central terminal, disembarking passengers were greeted by the
sensations of the nation's busiest train station: motor-driven baggage trucks, glaring arclights, red-capped porters, steam whistles, shouting conductors, hurrying passengers, and the high-pitched cries of the “newsies.” Every front page in New York that morning was still headlining the story that had broken three days earlier.